Archive for the ‘Neoludology’ Category

Railing on Mixotronic

Friday, March 13th, 2009

As part of my continuing self-education in web programming, I’ve decided to take a crack at revamping the venerable Mix-O-Tronic (which is still in quiet existence, by the way) into a Ruby on Rails application.

While I was sketching out the idea in my notebook, I suddenly got a flash of inspiration to use it as a sort of jump-off point for a social site.  Terms are still put together to elicit concepts from people – but users would have the option (if not obligation) to comment on any of the terms (I’m thinking of renaming them ‘phrases’), or the concept as a whole.  When terms come up for other users, they can see the trail of comments that people have left, some other concepts that have been created with them, and so on.  And if a concept comes up for another person, the same applies.

Terms could be added by users (subject to approval, of course) – which would cut down on the workload for keeping it up-to-date and back-cataloging the whole thing, which is still a problem.

I think it would be a very niche (but fun) social site, and pretty straight-forward to code in Rails.  A sort of high-concept pitch machine rolled in the madness of crowds.

In other Mix-O-Tronic news, I have the following books out from the library:

1001 Books to Read Before You Die

1001 Movies to Read Before You Die, and

The Encyclopedia of American Television (1945-2003).

Reading the entry on Benson alone is worth lugging around the last title.

The Current Bucket List

Sunday, June 15th, 2008

Here, for my own benefit mainly, is a complete core dump of all the game ideas that I have either on the front burner, back burner, or in the percolator:

Front Burner:

Back Burner:

Percolating:

Oort

Sunday, June 15th, 2008

By the way, this post on the ultra-new Elsewhere blog debuts the use of graphic banners for the various games that I’m working on. Isn’t this one pretty? It’s for Oort.

Oort is an idea that popped into my head while playing the very excellent indie computer game Dyson, which is a procedurally-generated RTS where you colonize an asteroid field with a swarm of self-replicating robots. The different asteroids that you colonize give the robots created there different properties. The differences aren’t really all that noticable in the game, but that’s not really the point. It’s very engaging and don’t install it if you have any actual work to get done.

This got my mind turning over, wondering if you could construct a sort of strategy/roleplaying game based on the idea. As an added touch, the game would play with table-chatter by limiting player-to-player communication to the short list of nouns and verbs in the game. Why not?

Here’s what I have so far:

At some point (I’m imagining a deck of cards with different Trans-Neptunian bodies on them), you turn up the Artifact, and things start to change. Each of the characters starts to develop ‘culture’. In the beginning, all of the players are working collectively to return resources to Earth. From contact with the Artifact on, the different characters begin competing with one another, attempting to achieve dominance over the others in one way or another (perhaps decided by the special functions that they’ve chosen), so the game goes from co-op to competitive.

As the turns continue, more of the swarm’s commands must include keywords that the Artifact introduces.  This cranks up the differences between the swarms and the competitiveness – it gets progressively harder to get things done, and the machines are progressively focused on achieving a very small number of goals.

The other aspect of the game that I enjoy is toying with the communication at the table – requiring that players communicate with one another with only the vocabulary in play.  Impossible to enforce, I know, but it strikes me as interesting anyways.

Decathalon and Bluebeard: Rise of the Minigame

Friday, June 6th, 2008

On a recent episode of The Dice Tower boardgame podcast, the #1 response in a poll on what sort of sports-themed board game the listeners would want to see published was ‘the decathalon’.

During Game Chef, I was in a critique group (Go Hydra!) with a gentleman named SirElfinJedi, who created a game called ‘Masks of the Nautica’, which uses a mechanic based on a compass rose: the GM pics a direction (northeast, for example) and the player chooses a range of compass points based on the relative strength of their skills.  If they pic the right one, they succeed.

I’ve wanted to make a pirate game based around the Brethren Court introduced in the last Pirates of the Caribbean movie, which was itself loosely based on the actual Brethren of the Coast, a loose coalition of pirates in the Caribbean.

What do these three things have in common?  Mini-games, baby.  More specifically, a cluster of mini-games sharing the same mechanical core.

Let’s start with the decathalon, which gives us the physical games to model on.  The events of the decathalon are:

Day 1: 100 metres, long jump, shotput, high jump, 400 metres.

Day 2: 110 metre hurdles, discus, pole vault, javelin, 1500 metres.

The next step comes from clustering them together by type:

Footraces: 100m, 400m, 1500m.

Running + Throw/Jump: Long jump, high jump, pole vault, javelin.

Throw: Shotput, discus.

Now we can start to think of a way to model these games.  I’ll do that in the next post.

For the pirate game, I’ve already picked out a few minigames: mumbley-peg, the knife trick, shut-the-box, liar’s dice and the compass rose mechanic I mentioned above.  Each of these would perform a different task: mumbley-peg for duels, the knife trick for social challenges, liar’s dice for narrative control, shut-the-box for naval combat, and the compass rose for … a lot of other things.

Why do this?  And why do it in what is (ostensibly) an RPG?
It has to do with my idea of distributed play: that the form of a game influences the way that players interact with it.  Yes, I could just make one unified mechanic that would handle all of these things, but I’m interested in how player skill, and the difference in player skill, would play out in the choices of the players.  Someone who’s good at the mumbley-peg portion might use that to his or her advantage by bringing that mechanic into play more often.

What a collection of mini-games does, apart from adding a large dose of theme (always a good thing), is give players different paths to success.  Mixing that together with differences on the character sheet gives a wider variety of play for the game, and helps to support the unique, off-beat feel that I want to give the characters in Bluebeard.

A game design Challenge, and other notes.

Thursday, May 29th, 2008

I’ve been challenged at Story Games by Jonathan Walton to a design challenge:

 Kuma: Write me a game set in a country that you’ve never heard of. Like, go find a world map and find some nation-state whose name is totally unfamiliar to you. Then read about that place and write me a game set there.

To which I responded:

As the winner of more than one geography bee in my day, there’s no nation-state I haven’t heard of (modern ones, at least). So instead, I did a random walk through Wikipedia until I hit an entry that referred to some nation outside of the US/Europe, etc that I hadn’t heard of before. The result: Makuria! Here’s the Wikipedia article.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makuria

I’m already imagining something to do with the ‘Six Cataracts’.

The Kingdom of Makuria was a pretty neat place.  It was Christian (as was most of Ethiopia at the time), and was bordered to the north by the rather large (and I’m sure threatening) Umayyad Caliphate, an Islamic empire that stretched from Persia all the way along the north of Africa and into Spain.  At the time, it was the largest empire in the world, and ranks as the sixth largest in all of history.

But that’s not what the game’s about, it’s about Makuria, a kingdom of a different religion, a neighbor to the largest empire of the day, sitting in what is today northern Sudan, a less-than-hospitable piece of land.  This sort of screams ‘it’s about being the underdog!’, but where is the game in that?

On the upside, the ‘Six Cataracts’ refers to six massive waterfalls that the Nile takes in this region.  Symbolically, this is awesome.  Perhaps the mechanics of the game could incorporate an Agon-like track for conflict that is six spaces long – or the game could progress between these six different states with different conditionals placed on play for what Cataract is currently in play.

In other words: I’m working on it.

Indie Games and Distributed Play, with some comments on Game Chef

Thursday, May 15th, 2008

The results for Game Chef will be announced tomorrow – assuming that the judges don’t have to push it back again. I’m quite happy with how Acts of Creation turned out – as a strategy game, it really clicks for me. The roleplaying aspect is a bit more understated, but that seems to be a design hurdle that I need to jump over. DEAD has the same issue: The game flows very well now that I’ve refined the shit out of it. The real question now is how to re-integrate the roleplaying aspects into the game.

Why?

Well, first of all I have a sort of Holy Grail that I’m shooting for, here. I really believe that the gap between the play of board and card games, particularly many of the eurogames, is not all that big, and that the integration of roleplaying into these games is not much more difficult than the integration of the mechanical variety of boardgames to RPGs.

Ancillary to that is the fact that I’m relatively bored with indie systems these days. While there are exciting things being done all the time thematically, and in terms of genre-bending, the mechanical richness of the indie set is lacking. A lot of the mechanics lately seem to boil down to fancy footwork to cover the fact that you’re really rolling another die. While this helps in terms of creating a narrative, these systems lack any real strategic or tactical depth.

I’m trying to mine boardgames and their components for new and mechanically interesting while still bringing the story home. I’ve gotten a lot more done with the first part, and I’m working hard on the second part.

One of the things I’ve talked about on here is the idea of Distributed Play – the idea that toys (or in our present discussion, game components) carry with them inherent mechanical options that aren’t suggested by others. For instance, if you play a game with a small set of cards marked 1-6, you could theoretically replace a six-sided die with the cards. However, the physical aspect of the cards allows for options that dice don’t have: they can be sorted, stacked, turned (‘tapped’), flipped and marked – all things that dice don’t do as easily or as well. These properties give a stack of six cards a different set of gameplay possibilities than a a similar number of dice.

The importance of this can’t be overstated – points and aspects and attributes are fine and well. But when their net effect is to simply add +1 to a number, the mechanical flora of games starts to pale.

GC08 Update

Friday, April 25th, 2008

My design is going apace – at this late stage, I’m thinking that I just have to start freakin’ writing and let the chips fall where they may (so to speak).

Part of the trick with the game is that the resources at hand for the players are extremely limited.  Everyone gets one hand of 13 cards per age, and all of the mechanics associated with the play of one age must fit with, or emerge from, the simple play of those cards.  I’ve been tempted more than once to go over to dice, and I think if I get enough validation to redesign I’m going to use Tarot cards instead, or perhaps just give them as an option.

As it is, just the raw writing of the game is going to take some time at this point, so I have to get started.  Examples are going to be key.

I’m also considering changing the name of the game to Acts of Creation.

Oh, and for a chuckle I went over the list of games that have influenced my design.  Here’s the list:

Polaris, Carcassonne, Eye of Judgement, Primeval and Black & White.

There are more, I’m sure.

The core system finally has a name …

Tuesday, March 25th, 2008

Cairn.

After much deliberation and a lot of searching, I finally have a name for the core mechanic that is underlying DEAD, Cold War, Merchant and a lot of other ideas these days. It took a long time, but now it seems intuitive and simple: a cairn – a pile of stones infused with meaning.

Awesome.

I tinkered with the idea of using the Inuit word inuksuk, until I realized that I’d be the most recent in a long line of white folks co-opting the term. Inuksuk are fascinating, though – check out a scholarly paper here, and some photos on Google Images. They were used in some instances as hunting blinds and ‘beaters’ – fake humans that would confuse caribou being herded into a slaughter area by Inuit hunters. Inuksuk means “something which acts for or performs the function of a person.” Which is something to take to heart for the games: That the cards and tokens themselves act like an additional player in the game.

Speaking of which, Tycho on Penny Arcade was talking about the function of raid decks for the World of Warcraft TCG, particularly the Molten Core deck. I’ve been studying the WoW TCG for a while now – mechanically, it’s pretty standard, but the execution is very cool. The Raid decks are an excellent extension of both the gestalt of online play to the TCG, and a fun idea in and of themselves. They’re essentially ‘dungeon decks’, played by a separate player, which have highly synergized and powerful cards. Defeating a raid deck requires that multiple players act cooperatively to defeat the challenges within.

This is the same idea as with DEAD – an antagonist deck that the other players cooperatively are trying to defeat. DEAD simply rotates the roles of the antagonist, and adds some suspense to the game by giving the antagonist some bonuses against the players.

I enjoy being occassionally correct.

Friday, March 7th, 2008

In this first part of a review of 4E by a playtester at Ain’t It Cool News, the following is said:

From Everquest to the World of Warcraft (and the many other imitators in between and after) comes the notion of perfect balance – the idea that every class, every character, every role in the party, has something to do and never, ever, has to sit on the sidelines.

I’m not the kind of guy to say I told you so. Cookie for Kuma!

D&D 4th Edition is a MM(P)RPG.

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

John Kim put up a link to a 4th Edition set of character sheets that were provided by WotC at the D&D Experience in Arlington, Virginia.  This is my first look at the new system (I’m not tracking it closely because I want to come to it relatively fresh when it’s released in June), and it stuck me very suddenly – just as D&D birthed the MMORPG, the MMORPG has now wrought changes in D&D.

Very interesting.

Most of the sheets are the same as usual, until you get to the feats, class features and spells.  Now, instead of spell lists, you have ‘Powers’, which are further sub-divided by type: At-Will, Encounter and Daily.  At-Will is like it says – as a standard action, use said power.  Encounter powers are used once per encounter, and Daily are used once (or more) until you rest.

Looking closer, the mechanical breakdown of spells, feats and skills have reached an all-time minimum.  Most powers have been stripped down to their mechanical roots, and those roots are laid bare.   For comparison, check out the text blocks on those sheets again this list of Warlock spells and abilities from a WoW site, or even this list of Elementalist skills from Guild Wars.   The similarity is striking.

So why am I writing about it here?  Well, first of all I find this sort of feeback loop very interesting.  If you want to lure WoW players into D&D, make D&D more like WoW.  Basic marketing logic.  Secondly, this provides a very interesting test basin for Elsewhere.  Whereas modelling D&D was always a chore for previous editions, this one should prove a snap.  I’m going to start working on some basic diagramming this weekend.  I’ve modeled WoW and Guild Wars using Elsewhere as a framework for a while, and D&D 4th seems like a good way for me to transition into ‘traditional’ RPGs.

Life, and the Encyclopedia Thereof.

Friday, February 29th, 2008

I heard about the Encyclopedia of Life on a Wisconsin Public Radio show today. The goal: Nothing less than categorizing every (living) species on the planet, and then work backwards. Don’t try to go there quite yet – the stress on the servers from all of the hits on the first day crashed the site. I’m sure they’re putting together some co-lo as we speak, or stringing baling twine, or somesuch.

As a worldbuilder, I’m excited about the possibilities that a random walk through such a site could give. Combine a yeti crab with a butterfly! Combine a horse and a species of algae!

I’d also like to take this opportunity to talk about a long-standing idea I’ve had: a system by which you could (theoretically) model any living organism’s properties in a game context. This spawned off a different idea for a universal technology system, which was itself spawned off of an idea for a universal starship model.  And of course the entire constellation of systems falls under the general rubric of Elsewhere.  But I digress.

The idea is actually straight-forward. You have a Life central stat, which is then described using the Linnaean Taxonomy to start statting out your creation: Kingdom (which determines what your other derived stats are, including things like size), Phylum (body shape, for the most part), Class (separating things like bugs from lions), and skipping a bunch of steps to Species.  Each of these attributes can be seen as a template – being in the Plant kingdom precludes a lot of things, for example, like eyes.

The system would (in theory) then take into account things like size and adjust accordingly.  The larger you are in your particular Phylum and Class, the more points you would need to add into a stat like Legs in order to be more mobile.  Conversely, the smaller you are, the more agile you are.  Creatures of differing size are equally effective at their own scale.  If you wanted to play a game with a hummingbird and an elephant, you can.  Just don’t expect toe-to-toe combat to go your way if you’re the hummingbird.

From there, you splice together your basic attributes (a la Elsewhere) to create feats and other stunts that your animal can do.  Long arms and arboreal?  You can brachiate!  Strong swimmer and articulated flippers?  Come on out of the water for short periods.

A much more restricted form of the idea hit me when I was reading a recent National Geographic on extremely weird new dinosaur finds.  Just taking a look at this  rogue’s gallery shows just how versatile evolution really is.  If you can dream it, it’s probably not only possible, but may have even walked the Earth at some point.  This led me to Red in Tooth, a dinosaur game that’s the same idea as Life, but pared down and focused much more.

Yep, chips make it better.

Thursday, January 31st, 2008

The chip & card mechanic (still unnamed) makes the economy in DEAD much more fluid and interesting; it’ll lower the number of cards I have to make dramatically; it creates a nice way to tie Interludes and Action Sequences.

I have to go redesign about 100 cards now.  Then I’ll cry for a bit.

Suddenly I have a core system.

Wednesday, January 30th, 2008

After writing a bunch of ideas down for the spy version of DEAD, tentatively called Cold War, I started to get that tingle in the back of my brain that I was on the edge of something. And today it broke through, when I was writing notes on my redux of Merchant, the medieval/slightly fantasy mercantile boardgame that I made oh-so-long-ago that can’t actually be played by human beings. Well, not without the aid of a computer, anyways.

What gel’d together was this: In Cold War, you have a number of locations in play (strategically important nations around the world – Afghanistan, Mexico, Cuba, etc.), and each has a stack of poker chips on it – either red (Soviet Bloc) or blue (US/NATO) to denote the current balance of power in the country. In Merchant, there’s a similar mechanic – a stack of poker chips denotes the development of resources on that particular location card. For example, you start with salt flats and build up to a salt mine. Color is used to denote who owns what.

Well, why not do something similar with DEAD? The current mechanic uses points instead of poker chips to denote Threat levels for the locations. These numbers are out of whack with the costs of the Action cards of the protagonists, making for some difficult balancing. By turning the chips into the Threat level, there’s both a handy visual reference for all involved, and the math (chips to Action points) is similar.

Of course, what’s the first stumbling block I’ve come across? What to call this shared set of core mechanics.

Such is the way my brain works, that brand identity would pop up as immediate concern. Oi vey.

How to Who?

Tuesday, January 15th, 2008

I’ve been watching the crap out of the new Doctor Who series.

While I’ve always been aware of Dr. Who – you’d have to have a frontal lobotomy to be around sci-fi as long as I have and not come face-to-face with the occassional Dr. Who episode, even without trying. Most of my exposure (until now) has been with the Tom Baker and Peter Davison varieties (Fifth and Sixth). I still consider Tom Baker to be ‘The’ Doctor, but David Tennant (the current, or Tenth Doctor) is by far my favorite. Tennant brings the vital energy and the darkness of The Doctor into full relief. Christopher Eccleston could have captured my heart completely on these matters, but his choice to leave after the first season diminishes him somewhat for me.

Anywho, the new Who series have completely transformed me into a Whovian, a Whoite … whatever.

So I’ve gotten to wondering how you could (with reasonable fidelity) make a Doctor Who RPG. Mind you, there’s already been one, but even by my very loose grading standards for mid-80s RPGs, it’s a stinker.

After watching several episodes in a row, here’s my take on the design-influencing factors that make a Who RPG difficult or mechanically different:

Here are some basic mechanics that I’m considering:

And that’s all I have so far. I have so many ideas floating around right now that I don’t think I can do anything about this, even in a free-and-under-the-table sort of way. So have at it, story-gamers.

Company of the DEAD

Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008

I’ve been playing a bit of Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts, which I recieved for Christmas.  It was in the middle of this that I was also doing a bit of thinking about card resources and making the card play in DEAD more dynamic.  While the results that I came to with DEAD had little to do with CoH, I realized that you could very easily port the system that I’m generating with DEAD over to a WW2 game.  Elements of the spy version of DEAD also crept in.

I don’t think I’d go right ahead and call it NAZI, for obvious reasons.  But the idea would be the same.  At any point in the game, there’s one player who is the Opposition – and whose ‘real’ character is neutral while they are the adversary.  During the action part of the game, the players are united against the Opposition, but in order to maximize their own effectiveness, they have to play cards against each other as well.

It’s possible that the system would have to be changed in order to accomodate the ‘Band of Brothers’ ideal that goes along with most WW2 portrayals today.  Maybe I’d be better off setting it in a less glamourized time period, like Vietnam.

Food for thought.

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